


Blood and Bones

by cable69



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-10
Updated: 2015-12-10
Packaged: 2018-05-05 22:10:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5392151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cable69/pseuds/cable69
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“The body is a jigsaw puzzle,” he says, voice like ice. “You cut it up, and put it back together.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blood and Bones

**Author's Note:**

> originally posted on ff.net; unedited

He picks up her hand, and one of the fingers falls off. He is wearing gloves to make sure no crimson blood taints his skin. He places the hand carefully next to its arm, retrieves the finger, and replaces that, too. He squeezes the digit as he puts it down, feeling the careless give of the skin. This is what death feels like.

Jim, by his side, is pale as clouds, his throat working as if he wants to vomit his heart out.

“That’s her?” Jim whispers, gazing at the corpse. “She doesn’t—it can’t be.”

“The body is a jigsaw puzzle,” he says, voice like ice. “You cut it up, and put it back together.”

“Quit being so logical—it’s more than that, for humans,” Jim tries to say, but he cuts Jim off.

“It is nothing more than that,” he insists. “The body is a countable number of cells and organs and muscles. The body has a beginning and an ending.” He sees her, alive in his mind’s eye, curly tomato-red hair and wide eyes; skin like a witch’s, that sterile green. And he sees her dead as she is now, the same hair and eyes and skin, and the lack of difference must be hitting Jim as hard as it is hitting him. Bodies are the same everywhere, alive or dead. He is a body. He is only blood and bone.

He imagines himself torn apart. He sees his own fingers ripped from their knuckles. A satisfying pop as the bones separate. Individual capillaries, thin threads, hanging out of his meat, sobbing blood. The blunt slice of a scalpel down his backbone, exposing his spinal column. The glistening bunch of nerves, humming in fear, screaming up the synapses towards his twitching brain as bone shards slice into them. Eyeballs, filled with gray fluid, folding under the cut of a knife, the cornea split down the middle, the blue iris falling inwards to land feather-like on its rods and cones, crushing them, and all of the colors and shapes fade into one, one vision of revulsion.

“Stop—please stop,” Jim whispers as Jim stares at his thoughts, grasping his arm, but he cannot stop, will not, he keeps projecting the images and keeps forcing Jim to watch them. His intestines, their gleaming coils spewing their bile into the cavity of his ribs, ribs like too many fingers reaching around him, long fingers like accusing lips, lips stripped of their sensitive skin and reduced to leaking muscle, muscles stretched too-tight over bright, splintering bone…

“We are nothing,” he spits at Jim, throwing the pictures at Jim, trying to show Jim this proof of their mortality, this indisputable evidence that neither of them are any more than parts in a machine.

“We are something!” Jim cries, looking away from the hateful images. “We are more than the sum of our parts—what else makes us what we are?”

Gaila’s body rots in front of their eyes. It was already pieces and pieces, and now it is lumps and lumps, thick and fleshy and smelling of shameful corners in shadowed cities. The dream-reality is unraveling. Jim’s face collapses into that of Nero, baring Nero’s teeth, and he feels the hate surging in him again, roaring upwards like a hurricane tide. Everything else has fallen away, and he is balancing in blackness, the Romulan growling like an animal as he approaches, clenching a long, cruel sword in his tattooed fist.

Nero stabs once, the blade sinking through his stomach like a pebble dropping through water. His muscles clench impossibly around the sword, drawing it in as if it is penetrating him sexually, and Nero has to fight to pull it out. Nero stabs him again, through the heart, and he can see his own valves and arteries fluttering, the left aorta pumping useless spurts of life into the stillness and uselessness of the void.

He is taking so much pleasure in his deconstruction. He is screaming and arching as the sword stabs into him again and again. He jerks roughly as the blade flirts over his jugular, moaning. The nearness of death is sweet. He understands death, for a pure moment; he understands why he wants this so badly. Death is spreading. Death is becoming more than you are; becoming different; becoming new.

“Yes,” he pants, his voice heavy with passion. The sword is wavering over his neck. “Please,” he pleads. He needs to feel the cut—the final glorious fountain of blood—

It is Jim that slashes downwards, Jim whose sword pierces his throat. Not Nero. He dies, blood pouring from the broken dam of his body, bone creaking to a final halt as his futile motions cease. The last thing he sees before he wakes is Jim, running his tongue along the sword’s dripping length, lapping up his blood, reveling in his spirit’s taste.

He sits straight up in bed. There is no veil between waking and sleeping for him. He is in sickbay, laid out on a biobed. The sounds of diagnosis and life-support come to him, and the scent of antiseptic is heavy in his nostrils.

“You looked like you needed a nap,” a voice says. “Here’s the inventory for cabinet F.” Chapel is handing him a PADD. He initials the form distractedly and passes it back to her. “Commander Spock has been looking for you,” Chapel adds before sweeping away.

Bones pushes two fingers against the side of his neck, searching for his pulse, hunting for the reassuring pump of blood. When he finds it, he breathes again, and gets up, and goes on with his day.


End file.
